Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary is an entertaining, warm and hopeful book with stacks of rewarding qualities.

Characters are likeable, loveable and heroic and you'll be cheering for them throughout.

It's a good thriller that's worth a few hard-earned bucks passed on to the author.

I rate it highly, but for all that, can't quite give it top marks for the following reasons, which is where this review gets kinda serious:

Project Hail Mary is the antithesis of hard science fiction.

That's quite some statement considering it's jam packed with scientific reasonings and explanations from start to finish.

Some might say it's dumbed down for the masses, but that would be unkind considering how informative and genuinely educational it is.

But when you explain things in such incredible detail, full of new and technical information, it's not sufficient to patch things together with glue or epoxy - or magical alien products put together by an incredibly efficient buddy - or to have magic fuels and energies explained to the nth degree that don't actually exist.

Project Hail Mary is fiction, fantasy, and feelgood bro-romance.

It's the next billion-dollar Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Nor does it claim to be hard (factual) science fiction, just written as though it's supposed to be.

The book needs to be read at a fast clip to mitigate the taped together implausibilities, with enough scientific fact to pause and think things through, which also makes the action plod along in places as you hover between contemplation while shaking off doubts as pure fiction. It can be jarring at times.

I can't say much else without giving away spoilers.

I'm a linguist and struggle with languages on a daily basis, living abroad and getting by on a diet that's never fully native, no matter how fast technology continues to advance; new language barriers with blind aliens who communicate through musical notes cannot be broken down in one day through an Excel spreadsheet and a bit of hackneyed programming.

The entire book is like this: convenient solutions after supposedly hard facts.

Four stars for invention, entertainment and Stars Wars-fueled hope in a galaxy far far away. In the right hands this is going to make a terrific movie.